If you have nursery visitors, you have responsibilities to adhere to. Nurseries should be welcoming places for legitimate visitors with genuine reasons to be on site. These could be prospective parents, parents who have volunteered as helpers, officials such as local authority inspectors and day-to-day contractors required for servicing and maintenance of the premises. Common and statutory laws place a duty on the nursery to take all reasonable steps to ensure the health, safety and welfare of non-employees such as visitors – even trespassers must not be placed in serious danger.
Further Policy and Procedure
If you don’t have one already, you should establish a visitor policy and associated procedures. Some of the items to consider include:
- Recognise that the nursery’s fundamental priority is for the safeguarding, security and safety of its children. As such, all visits to the site will be strictly by arrangement with the provision manager only. Spontaneous visits are permitted only in exceptional circumstances.
- Visitors will be required to sign in. Is your sign-in process GDPR compliant – read more…
- Use of visitor badges.
- Official visitors will be asked to prove their identity.
- Visitors should remain in sight of the staff at all times and must not be left alone with the children at any time.
- Visitors will be made aware of basic health and safety precautions and emergency procedures when they sign in.
- Staff have the right to refuse entry to an individual if they are uncertain as to the purpose of that person’s visit. If an unexpected visitor has no suitable reason to be on the premises he or she should be asked to leave immediately and escorted from the premises. If the visitor repeatedly refuses to leave, the member of staff in charge should telephone the police immediately.
- At no time should a visitor enter the children’s bathrooms unless accompanied by a member of staff
If you have any further questions or wondering how this might affect your nursery insurance policy please don’t hesitate to get in touch.